“I was jus’ wonderin’ ’ow yer missed knowin’ all this kind o’ thing. Lot o’ fuss about it in the papers, goin’ back a bit, like. Protests, an’ all. Work o’ the devil . . . railways. If the good Lord’ad meant us ter travel that way, an’ at that speed, ’E’d ’ave made us with steel skins an’ wheels on our feet.”

“And if He hadn’t meant us to think, He wouldn’t have given us brains,” Monk countered immediately, and even as the words were on his tongue, he heard an echo of them as if he had said them before.

“Yer try tellin’ that to some o’ them ministers ’oo’s churches get knocked down an’ moved!” The clerk’s face was eloquent of his awe, and an amusement he was trying hard to suppress.

“Knocked down and moved?” Monk repeated the words as if they were incredible, but he believed them—in fact, he knew they were true. Again memory had jabbed at him and then disappeared. For an instant he saw a lean face, dark with outrage, above a clerical collar. Then it was gone. “Yes, of course,” he said quickly. He did not want the man to tell him more about it. The memory was unpleasant, touched with guilt.

“O’ course they protest.” The clerk shrugged his shoulders. “All kinds of ’em out by the score. Talk about Mammon an’ the devil, an’ ruin of the land, an’ so on.” He scratched his head. “ ’Ave ter say I wouldn’t take kindly if it were me mam an’ dad ’oo’s gravestones were took up, an’ they was left ter lie under the tracks o’ the five forty-five from Paddington, or whatever. I reckon I’d be out there wi’ placards in me ’and an’ threatenin’ ’ellfire on the profiteers as did it.”

“Has anybody ever done more than threaten?” Monk had to ask. If he did not, the question would remain in his mind, written across everything else until he found the answer. “Anyone ever sabotage a line?”

The clerk’s eyebrows rose almost halfway up his forehead. “Yer mean blow up a train? Gawd! I ’ope not!” He bit his lip. “Come ter think on it, though, there’ve bin a few nasty crashes, one or two of ’em nobody knows for sure ’ow they ’appened. Usually blame the driver or the brakeman. There was a real bad one up Liverpool way about sixteen years ago, an’ that was one as’ad a church removed, an’ the vicar was right cut up about it.” He stared at Monk with increasing horror. “Terrible one, that was. I was still livin’ at ’ome, an’ I can remember me dad comin’ inter the parlor, ’is face white as the tablecloth, an’ no newspaper in ’is ’and. It was a Sunday dinnertime. We’d bin ter church so we’adn’t seen the early papers.”

“ ’W’ere’s the papers, George?’ me mam asked’im.